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A question came in via my personal Tumblr blog that I thought you might be interested in. For sure, I think it deserves some of your attention, so I’m addressing it here. That question:

game-subtext

Q: If games have texts (the rule books and source material), then they have subtexts. Do you consider the subtexts of the games you’re writing? That you’re running? How do you reach your conclusions?

For weeks, I’ve been wrestling with a good, rich answer to this—something that’d offer some insight into how subtext gets elegantly set under a text. While wrestling, I emailed this question to Jeff, naturally, and here’s what he had to say:

My immediate reaction is that the subtext of a game you’re designing can’t be baked in on purpose, almost by definition. And I think that if you did try to create subtext proactively, you’d probably make the game worse as a game, in the same way that most of the time you make a straight story worse by trying to advance some kind of theme in advance of telling a high-quality story.

I think a game can have a subtext, just as a novel (say) can obviously have a theme. But I think it’s best to allow each to arise organically based on what the designer or author happens to think, the unique spin and baggage that they bring to the project.

I’ve never considered, in a serious way, the subtext of a game I’ve worked on, that I can think of.

It’s probably worth settling on a definition for subtext as I, for example, don’t agree with Jeff that subtext can’t be baked in. I think subtext tends to be emergent, in addition to that which you add as an ingredient, but that you can stir theme into the mix and hope that it comes across in the final taste of the thing.

Let’s use the OAD’s definition of subtext, ’cause I have it handy: “an underlying and often distinct theme in a piece of writing or conversation.” That pairs well with what we’re talking about, since RPGs are both writing and conversation.

Whatever my answer to that first question, far above, I know that we have to understand that the subtext of a game text and the subtext of a game session are two different things. When we identify the identity of a game, are we talking about the textual artifact—the book—or the experience of actual play. One is not indicative of the other, necessarily, and only one of those, the book, is easily comparable.

Is the subtext of a Vampire supplement or the Trail of Cthulhu rulebook the subtext of the game or just the book? What do we even mean when we try to identify a game? What combination of text and play is that?

Without agreeing on an answer to that thorny beast, I feel comfortable saying that, yes, I consider the subtext of games that I’m writing and running.

It’s difficult, in actual practice, to prescribe subtext for multi-author books like a Vampire covenant book, for example, but I tried. I tried, but things either got lost in the subtext that emerged naturally during the writing process or, more often, subtext become actual text as we leveled with the reader directly about the themes of the book and the ways those themes could come out during play. Ritualized hunts for human blood became actual ritualized English hunting parties, for example, which has some subtext to it, but is pretty boldly textual, too.

I mean, look, the hunting party celebrating and formalizing the act is right there in front of your character. That says pretty clearly that these vampires have socialized and domesticated their personal act of horror, attempted to tame it like a dog, even if we know that each one of them has a Beast within, unable to be tamed. Everything we implied, about the irony of aristocrats bent on keeping themselves hidden simultaneously going to all this trouble to ritualize something base and horrific, showing it off to each other so that they don’t feel so alone, was probably either magnified into direct text or lost.

Subtext is easy to reject in a game book, though. I recall some people rejecting the hunting parties of these socialite vampires because they skirted against the Masquerade and diminished the horror of the hunt. That’s a fair argument, I suppose, because the ritualized hunting parties did just that. It was the whole point of the hunting parties dramaturgically. But because we didn’t say it outright, it either got missed or didn’t count. Or something.

That’s the risk of using subtext as a load-bearing support in an RPG book. You can sometimes do that in a novel, in which you have a great story (one hopes) as the reason to show up and read. The theme and subtext may be bonus treasure for those readers who notice it. But in an RPG book, which is part encyclopedia, part fictional travelogue, part technical guide, leaving material to subtext is like leaving it partly hidden. It might go unnoticed. That’s no good for a guidebook that purports to be there to train the reader to evoke subtext during play.

The book needs to hand subtext right to the reader and say, “Here’s some theme. Go and tie it around the hunting party’s bridle and see if anyone notices.”

(Except for when it doesn’t. Gaming books like Vampire’s covenant books and clan books are reading material, rather than technical guides, for no small number of customers. So I kept striving for subtext, right or wrong, to give some depth for readers. My Ventrue clan book is loaded with subtext both intentional and not, thanks to where I was emotionally when I wrote it.)

As for subtext in gaming sessions… that’s a whole other post. Stay tuned for that one.